The revolutionary movement in various European and Asian
countries has latterly made itself felt so weightily that we see before us
the fairly clear outlines of a new and incomparably higher stage in the
international proletarian struggle.

There has been a counter-revolution in Persia—a peculiar combination
of the dissolution of Russia’s First Duma, and of the Russian insurrection
at the close of 1905. Shame fully defeated by the Japanese, the armies of
the Russian tsar are taking their revenge by zealously serving the
counter-revolution. The exploits of the Cossacks in mass shootings,
punitive expeditions, manhandling and pillage in Russia are followed by
their exploits in suppressing the revolution in Persia. That Nicholas
Romanov, heading the Black-Hundred landlords and capitalists scared by
strikes and civil war, should be venting his fury on the Persian
revolutionaries, is understandable. It is not the first time that Russia’s
Christian soldiers are cast in the role of international hangmen. That
Britain is pharisaically washing her hands of the affair, and maintaining a
demonstratively friendly neutrality towards the Persian reactionaries and
supporters of absolutism, is a somewhat different matter. The British
Liberal bourgeoisie, angered by the growth of the labour movement at home
and frightened by the mounting revolutionary struggle in India, are more
and more frequently, frankly and sharply demonstrating what brutes
the highly “civilised” European “politicians”, men who have passed
through the high school of constitutionalism, can turn into when it comes
to a rise in the mass struggle against capital and the capitalist colonial
system, i. e., a system of enslavement, plunder and violence. The position
of the Persian
revolutionaries is a difficult one; theirs is a country which the masters
of India on the one hand, and the counter revolutionary Russian Government
on the other, were on the point of dividing up between themselves. But the
dogged struggle in Tabriz and the repeated swing of the fortunes of war to
the revolutionaries who, it seemed, had been utterly defeated, are evidence
that the Shah’s bashi-bazouks, even though aided by Russian
Lyakhovs[1] and British diplomats, are encountering the most vigorous
resistance from the people. A revolutionary movement that can offer armed
resistance to attempts at restoration, that compels the attempters to call
in foreign aid—such a movement cannot be destroyed. In these
circumstances, even the fullest triumph of Persian reaction would merely be
the prelude to fresh popular rebellion.

In Turkey, the revolutionary movement in the army, led by the Young
Turks, has achieved victory. True, it is only half a victory, or even less,
since Turkey’s Nicholas II has so far managed to get away with a promise to
restore the celebrated Turkish constitution. But in a revolution such
half-victories, such forced and hasty concessions by the old regime, are
the surest guarantee of new and much more decisive, more acute fluctuations
of the civil war, involving broader masses of the people. And the school of
civil war is never lost upon nations. It is a hard school, and its complete
course necessarily includes victories for the counter-revolution,
the unbridled licence of the infuriated reactionaries, the savage reprisals
of the old government against the rebels, etc. But only incurable pedants
and doddering mummies can moan over the fact that the nations have entered
this very painful school. For it is one that teaches the oppressed classes
how to wage civil war and how to carry the revolution to victory. It
concentrates in the masses of contemporary slaves the hatred which
downtrodden, benighted and ignorant slaves have always carried within them,
and which leads to the supreme history-making feats of slaves who have
realised the shame of their slavery.

In India lately, the native slaves of the “civilised” British
capitalists have been a source of worry to their “masters”. There Is no
end to the acts of violence and plunder which goes under the name of the
British system of government in
India. Nowhere in the world—with the exception, of course of
Russia—will you find such abject mass poverty, such chronic starvation
among the people. The most Liberal and Radical personalities of free
Britain, men like John Morley—that authority for Russian and non-Russian
Cadets, that luminary of “progressive” journalism (in reality, a lackey
of capitalism)—become regular Genghis Khans when appointed to govern
India, and are capable of sanctioning every means of “pacifying” the
population in their charge, even to the extent of flogging
political protestors! Justice, the little weekly of the British
Social-Democrats, has been banned in India by these Liberal and
“Radical” scoundrels like Morley. And when Keir Hardie, the British
M. P. and leader of the Independent Labour Party, had.the. temerity to
visit India and speak to the Indians about the most elementary democratic
demands, the whole British bourgeois press raised a howl against this
“rebel”. .And now the most influential British newspapers are in a fury
about. “agitators” who disturb the tranquillity of India, and are
welcoming court sentences and administrative measures in the purely
Russian, Plehve style to suppress democratic Indian publicists. But in
India the street is beginning to stand up for its writers arid
political leaders. The infamous sentence pronounced by the British jackals
on the Indian democrat Tilak—he was sentenced to a long term of exile,
the question in the British House of Commons the other day revealing that
the Indian jurors had declared for acquittal and that the verdict had been
passed by the vote of the British jurors!—this revenge against a
democrat by the lackeys of the money-bag evoked street demonstrations and a
strike in Bombay. In India, too, the proletariat has already developed to
conscious political mass struggle—and, that being the case, the
Russian-style British regime in India is doomed! By their colonial plunder
of Asian countries, the Europeans have succeeded in so steeling one of
them, Japan, that she has gained great military victories, which have
ensured her independent .national development. There can be no doubt that
the age-old plunder of India by the British, and the contemporary struggle
of all these “advanced” Europeans against Persian and Indian democracy,
will steel millions, tens of millions of proletarians in Asia to
wage
a struggle against their oppressors which will be just as victorious as
that of the Japanese. The class-conscious European worker now has comrades
in Asia, and their number will grow by leaps and bounds.

In China, too, the revolutionary movement against the medieval order
has made itself felt with particular force in recent months. True, nothing
definite can yet be said about the present movement’—there is such scanty
information about it and such a spate of reports about revolts in various
I)arts of the country. But there can be no doubt about the vigorous growth
of the “new spirit” and the “European currents” that are stirring in
China, especially since the Russo-Japanese war; and consequently, the
old-style Chinese revolts will inevitably develop into a conscious
democratic movement. That some of the participants in colonial plunder are
this time greatly concerned is borne out. by the way the French are acting
in Indo-China: they helped the “historic authorities” in China
to put down the revolutionaries! They feared equally for the safety of
their “own˜˜ Asian possessions bordering on China.

The French bourgeoisie, however, are concerned not only over their
Asian possessions. The barricades at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, near Paris,
the shooting down of the strikers who built these barricades (on Thursday,
July 30[17])—these events are renewed evidence of the sharpening of the
class struggle in Europe. Clemenceau, the Radical, who governs France on
behalf of the capitalists, is working with uncommon zeal to shatter the
last lingering remnants of republican-bourgeois illusions among the
proletariat. The shooting down of the workers by troops acting on the
orders of a. “Radical” government has, under Clemenceau, become almost
more frequent than before.. The French socialists have already,
dubbed. Clemenceau “The Red” for this; and now, when his agents,
gendarmes and generals have again shed the blood of the workers, the
socialists recall the catch- phrase once uttered by this ultra-progressive
bourgeois republican to a workers’ delegation: “You and I are on different
sides of the barricade.” Yes, the French proletariat and the most extreme
bourgeois republicans have finally taken their place on opposite sides of
the barricade. The French working class shed much blood to win and defend
the republic,
and now, on the basis of the fully established republican order, the
decisive struggle between the propertied class and the working people is
rapidly coming to a head. “It was not simply brutality,”
L’Humanité[2] wrote of the July 30 events, “it was part
of a battle.” The generals and the police were bent on provoking the
workers and turning a peaceful unarmed demonstration into a massacre. But
the troops that surrounded and attacked the unarmed strikers and
demonstrators met with resistance, their action leading to the immediate
erection of barricades, and to events which are agitating the whole of
France. These barricades, L’Humanité says, were built of
boards and were ludicrously ineffectual. But that is not important. What is
important is that the Third Republic had eliminated the old habit of
barricades; whereas now “Clemenceau is reviving that habit"—and he is
just as candid about the matter as were “the butchers of June 1848, and
Galliffet in 1871", on the subject of civil war.

And the socialist press is not alone in recalling these great historic
dates in connection with the events of July 30. The bourgeois press is
furiously attacking the workers, accusing them of behaving as if they
intended to start a socialist revolution. One paper cites a minor but
characteristic incident indicative of the mood of both sides at the scene
of action. When the workers were carrying a wounded comrade past General
Virvaire, who directed the operations against the strikers, there were
shouts from the demonstrators: “Saluez!" And the general of the
bourgeois republic saluted his wounded enemy.

The sharpening of the struggle between the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie is to be observed in all the advanced capitalist countries. The
tendency is the same everywhere, though it manifests itself differently in
accordance with the difference in historical conditions, political systems
and forms of the labour movement. In America and Britain, where complete
political liberty exists and where the proletariat has no revolutionary and
socialist traditions that could be called living traditions, this
sharpening of the struggle is expressed in the mounting movement against
the trusts, in the extraordinary growth of socialism and the increasing
attention it is getting from the propertied classes, and in workers’
organisations, in some cases purely economic
ones, that are beginning to enter upon systematic and independent
proletarian political struggle. In Austria and Germany, and partly also in
the Scandinavian countries, this sharpening of the class struggle shows
itself in election campaigns, in party relationships, .in the closer
alignment of the bourgeoisie of all sorts and shades against their common
enemy, the proletariat, and in the hardening of judicial and police
persecution. Slowly but surely, the two opposing camps are building up
their strength, consolidating their organisations, drawing apart with
increasing sharpness in every sphere of public life, as if preparing,
silently and intently, for the impending revolutionary battles. In the
Latin countries, Italy and particularly France, the sharpening of the class
struggle is expressed in especially stormy, violent, and occasionally
forthright revolutionary outbreaks, when the pent-up hatred of the
proletariat for its oppressors bursts out with unexpected force, and the
“peaceful” atmosphere of parliamentary struggle gives way to episodes of
real civil war.

The international revolutionary movement of the proletariat does not
and cannot develop evenly and in identical forms in different
countries. The full and all-round utilisation of every opportunity in every
field of activity comes only as the result of the class struggle of the
workers in the various countries. Every country contributes its own
valuable and specific features to the common stream; but in each particular
country the movement suffers from its own one-sidedness, its own
theoretical and practical shortcomings of the individual socialist
parties. On the whole we clearly see a tremendous step forward of
international socialism, the rallying of million-strong armies of the
proletariat in the course of a series of practical clashes with the enemy,
and the approach of a decisive struggle with the bourgeoisie—a struggle
for which the working class is far better prepared than in the
days of the Commune, that last great proletarian insurrection.

And this step forward of the whole of international socialism, along
with the sharpening of the revolutionary democratic struggle in Asia,
places the Russian revolution in a special and especially difficult
position. The Russian revolution has a great international ally both in
Europe and
in Asia, but, at the same time, and for that very reason, it has
not only a national, not only a Russian, but also an international
enemy. Reaction against the mounting proletarian struggle is inevitable in
all capitalist countries, and it is uniting the bourgeois governments of
the whole world against every popular movement, against every revolution
both in Asia and, particularly, in Europe. The opportunists in our Party,
like the majority -of the Russian liberal intelligentsia, are still
dreaming of a bourgeois revolution in Russia that will “not alienate” or
scare away the bourgeoisie, that will not. engender “excessive” reaction,
or lead to the seizure of power by the revolutionary classes. Vain hopes! A
philistine utopia! The amount of inflammable material in all the advanced
countries of the world is increasing so speedily, and the conflagration is
so clearly spreading to most Asian countries which only yesterday. were in
a state of deep slumber, that the intensification of international
bourgeois reaction and the aggravation of every single national revolution
are absolutely inevitable.

The historical tasks of our revolution are not being-per formed by the
forces of counter-revolution, and cannot be. The Russian bourgeoisie are
necessarily gravitating more and more towards the international
anti-proletarian and antidemocratic trend. It is not on liberal allies that
the Russian proletariat should count. It must . follow its own independent
path to the complete victory of the revolution, basing itself on the need
for a forcible solution of the agrarian question in Russia by the peasant
masses themselves, helping them to overthrow the rule of the Black- Hundred
landlords and the Black-Hundred autocracy, setting itself the task of
establishing a. democratic dictator ship of the proletariat and the
peasantry in Russia, and remembering that its struggle and its victories
are inseparable from the international revolutionary movement. Less
illusions about the liberalism of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie
(counter-revolutionary both in Russia and the world over). More attention
to the growth of the international revolutionary proletariat!

Notes

[1]Lyakhov, V. P.—a colonel in the tsarist army, commander of
the Russian troops who crushed the national-revolutionary movement in
Persia in 1908.

[2]L’Humanité—a daily newspaper founded by Jean
Jaurès in 1904 as the organ of the French Socialist Party. Shortly
after the split in the Party at the December 1920 Congress and the,
formation of the French Communist Party the newspaper became the Central
Organ of the Communists. The newspaper is being published in Paris to this
day.